A Writer's Life (39 page)

I planned to drive directly to the address he had given me, 209 Alabama Avenue. I thought that perhaps the bride-to-be might be in the house, getting things ready for the next night's wedding. I did not consider telephoning ahead. I would just show up, and, if she was there, I would introduce myself and hope to get my foot in the door. I had not revealed my intentions to the mayor. Since he used to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door, I assumed that he would understand.

The house was a mauve-toned single-story frame Victorian structure with a beige picket fence, located on a quiet tree-lined residential street in an integrated neighborhood that existed beyond the purview of Selma's antebellum pride. There were no mansions on this street, not even large houses. It had been a lower- to middle-income white area until recently, and the whites who now remained among the newly arrived black residents were mainly elderly people, retired teachers, office workers, and other pensioners with no children to attend to and with lots of time on their hands. As I parked my car behind another car at the curb in front of the Miller home, I noticed that I was being watched from across the street by a frail-looking woman with unkempt white hair who was holding on to the wooden railing of her front porch. I could also hear echoing loudly in the near distance, coming from the direction of the river and bridge, a forceful female voice calling instructions over a loudspeaker. That voice might belong to Rose Sanders, I thought, rehearsing her people for one of the programs.

I knocked only once before the door was opened by a tallish, blue-eyed, strawberry-blond woman in her early thirties who was carefully coiffed and attired and was appealing both in a physical sense and in her friendly manner. Smiling, she accepted my congratulations, even though as I offered them I was not sure that she was the bride-to-be.

“Thank you,” she said, extending a hand. “I'm Betty Ramsey. Tomorrow, I'll be Betty Miller.”

She led me into the living room and introduced me to her teenage daughters. One was blond, the other brunette. They had been watching television, but, without being told, they turned off the set and left the
room, as if aware that their mother wished to speak with me alone. I guessed that the mayor had telephoned her from his office, warning that I might be stopping by. She hardly seemed to mind. She offered me something to drink and then sat across from me for the next hour, answering all my questions, while also adding information of her own. It was one of the easiest interviews I had ever conducted—or rather, it was
she
who conducted much of it, perhaps seeing me as a convenient and timely means of spreading the nuptial news to the general public, from which she, until now, at least among most white people in Selma, had more or less remained isolated by choice, or necessity, or a bit of both.

As I sat listening to her description of her nearly decade-long relationship with Randall Miller, jotting it down as quickly and fully as I could on the folded sheets of hotel stationery that served as my notepad, I began to see Betty Ramsey as a kind of renegade, a radicalized romantic who tomorrow, wearing an off-white satin gown and standing in front of a black Baptist minister, would be coming out and crossing over, ceremoniously affiliating herself with a minority more separate and segregated probably than the one she was marrying into. Willingly, she was entering into a sector of society in which grandparents white or black did not always easily recognize, or want to recognize, their grandchildren.
Miscegenation
—the very word suggested a nation of misplacement, misalliance, and misery. Even though the state of Alabama was apparently not enforcing its statute against interracial matrimony—there was even talk of a proposed amendment that would remove the language from the law books—Betty Ramsey must be a most intrepid and inner-directed woman, I told myself, or else she would have avoided becoming intimate with a black man in Selma and would not be discussing it so openly with me now.

She said that prior to meeting Randall Miller—which she had done in 1981, shortly after moving to Selma from her native Arkansas with her husband and children—she had never been acquainted with a black man, nor had she been accustomed to having black people as part of her community. She had been born, reared, and educated in a segregated town that was not even half the size of Selma. When her husband's income as a rural schoolteacher proved to be inadequate for the support of the family, he accepted a position managing a three-hundred-acre farm in Selma owned by an Arkansas businessman. The job paid one thousand dollars a month, plus free housing, a food allowance, a vehicle to drive, and forty acres that he could sharecrop or farm himself. Betty Ramsey, who had a degree in education but did not teach, accompanied him with their daughters, aged nine and seven, and enrolled them in the local public
school, where the student body was equally divided between blacks and whites. The girls adjusted easily and enjoyed the new experience; but Betty, unhappily married in Arkansas, was just as unhappy in Selma until she fell in love.

The first time she saw Randall Miller was when he had walked into the Carpet Mart, accompanied by his wife, Winona. Betty, who had taken a job there, stood watching from the other side of the store as they were attended to by the owner, a middle-aged white man who was friendly with Randall Miller because the latter was a regular customer, having formerly purchased many items needed by the various city-supervised agencies. In addition to carpets, the store sold wallpaper, window shades, floor tiles, and paint. On this occasion, Randall and Winona Miller were there to select a particular shade of gray paint with which to cover their home's cornice and other exterior embellishments. A few days after the paint had been delivered to their home, Randall returned alone to exchange it. He explained to Betty, who was then the only one on duty, that the gray paint he and his wife had selected contained a greenish tinge that he had not noticed earlier, and so he wondered if he could make another selection.

Overcoming her initial shyness as a new employee assisting for the first time a black man whom she found attractive, she was pleased to help him find precisely what he said he had been looking for when he had walked in. After he had thanked her as he carried away the paint, and waved to her from his car as he drove off, she continued to have thoughts about him during the afternoon, without imagining that she would be hearing from him a day later and many times more in the weeks and months that followed.

“He started by telephoning me at the store, and then stopping in—not to buy anything, just to chat—and yet it took me quite a while before I'd attached any significance to this,” she told me. “Whether he telephoned or just walked in, he'd always start the conversation by asking to speak with my boss. But my boss never seemed to be in at the time. Later I did begin to wonder if Randall knew beforehand that the boss wasn't in. If you drove past the store, you could see that the boss's car wasn't parked in its usual place along the side of the building, and you could also see when I was working in there alone—there was a big plate-glass window in front. And yet, as I say, it took me a while. Randall was always respectful and nice,” she went on. “He impressed me as a real friendly type. He was interested in how I was getting along in Selma, and how my daughters were doing in school, and what I thought about this or that. Even when his talk started getting a little more personal, you weren't sure exactly
how to take it. It could mean one thing. Or it could mean something else.”

The fact that Randall was black also contributed to Betty's early doubt that he was pursuing her. He had been born more than forty years ago in Selma and had surely grown up hearing about the horrible history of black men in the South who had so much as looked twice at a white woman. While lynching was a thing of the past, this was still Selma, a town in which gossip, scandal, and maybe worse might result from any interracial intimacy that Randall might have in mind; and Betty continued to ask herself, Why would he risk it? He was a prominent political figure. He had many friends and associates among the city's blacks and whites. He was married to a schoolteacher, they had a daughter, and he owned a lucrative funeral business that catered exclusively to black people. If he betrayed his wife and took up with a white woman, wouldn't this cause resentment in the black community and encourage people to take their business to another funeral home? And finally, didn't Randall foresee big problems if something
did
develop between the two of them and her husband learned about it?

Betty did not share her concerns with Randall, she told me, because during the first six or eight months of their acquaintanceship, she had no proof that her concerns were legitimate. She might be misinterpreting or imagining his ultimate purpose. She was therefore contented to leave things as they were. She had someone to talk to who was interesting and different. If there were no customers in the store, and her boss was away—she soon became aware of her employer's daily routine, his golf schedule, his other outside appointments—she and Randall could talk at length, either in person or over the telephone. She looked forward to his calls and visits. In the beginning, their discussions were centered mainly on her—since he did most of the questioning—but gradually it was she who took the lead. She was very comfortable with and very curious about Randall Miller.

Whatever preconceived notions she might have once had about black people living in the Deep South—that is, their inclination to be subordinate, indolent, or a bit stoical—certainly did not apply to Randall Miller and his kinsmen in Selma. Randall's father, Ben, had been born poor but was smitten with ambition and resourcefulness, and while in his early forties he simultaneously owned or co-owned a restaurant, a real estate business, a barbershop, a working farm, and a funeral parlor. He would sire seven children, all of whom received an advanced education, even while contributing to Ben Miller's labor force, learning the value of a hardearned dollar under a demanding taskmaster. The emancipation of
Selma's slaves long ago did not necessarily make life easier for the progeny of Ben Miller.

The second-born child, Randall, rarely knew leisure. When he was not attending classes in grade school, he was shining shoes in the barbershop, or scrubbing pots in the restaurant, or digging dirt on the farm, or washing limousines prior to a funeral. He had thoughts of one day becoming a doctor, but his father saw his future in embalming. Ben's other children would go on to become teachers and school administrators, but Randall's fate was sealed in 1958 when he was nineteen and a premed student attending a black college, Stillman, located in Tuscaloosa, not far from the University of Alabama. Inasmuch as the last of his father's licensed morticians had just quit after a quarrel, and since Ben himself lacked the proper credentials to prepare a corpse for burial, he thought that it would be an excellent idea for Randall to transfer from Stillman to the Atlanta College of Mortuary Science. Charming when he had to be, Ben cajoled and gradually convinced his son that the latter had been born to succeed in a grand way in the funeral trade: Randall possessed a consoling nature, he was patient and personable, and, since he was tall and good-looking—he had been a basketball star at Stillman—he would cut a dashing figure as he appeared wearing a dark suit with a boutonniere on his lapel, and his broad shoulders would offer comfort and support to bereaved widows.

In 1959, Randall graduated in Atlanta with a degree in mortuary science. He then returned to Selma to work in the funeral parlor under his father. A year later, when Randall was twenty-one, he married his high school sweetheart, Winona, and the following year the couple had a daughter. While not a civil rights activist when Selma first began making the news with its voter-registration drives in the early 1960s, Randall did join Dr. King's procession from Selma to Montgomery in mid-March 1965. He drove a hearse behind the last row of marchers. It was a tail-finned 1960 Cadillac with a blue body and a white top, and Randall had a dome light that he could attach to the roof when using the vehicle as an ambulance.

In addition to the black persons' hospital in Selma, the only other medical facility in the city that accepted black patients was the Catholic hospital, Good Samaritan. But in the event that Dr. King was shot or otherwise harmed along the highway during the five-day journey, Randall was instructed to take the civil rights leader to Craig Field, six miles outside Selma, where a United States Air Force jet stood ready to fly King to Washington for treatment at the Walter Reed Hospital. The hearse that Randall was driving was one of several black-owned vehicles that had been loaned to the march's organizers, and at night, while the marchers
rested at a campsite, the hearse served Randall as his sleeping quarters. On the fifth and final day of the march, following the highway murder by the Klan of Viola Liuzzo, Randall was dispatched to pick up her body, but the Alabama state police did not permit him to pass their roadblock.

In 1974, Randall became his father's partner at the mortuary, and in 1983, following his father's death—and after Randall had bought out the inherited interests of his siblings—he assumed sole ownership of the Miller Funeral Service, subsequently expanding it within Selma, and also within the neighboring community of Marion, into a flourishing business that fueled nearly twenty Cadillac limousines. His marriage to Winona was not a happy one, but the combined demands of his business and his responsibilities within the Smitherman administration gave him little time and not much incentive to worry about his domestic situation
until
his relationship with Betty Ramsey was no longer restricted to the store, and he began to anticipate the day when Winona and Betty's husband learned about it.

Betty and Randall became lovers after knowing each other for a bit more than a year. It began with his suggestion that they meet after work and perhaps go to a motel situated at some distance from downtown; as she had already decided that her marriage was over, and that she was in love with Randall, she agreed. They were as cautious as they could be, parking in the motel's back lot and registering under the name of one of Randall's friends, a man who had paid for the room earlier and then delivered the key to Randall prior to the couple's arrival. But within a month, several people in Selma were aware of the relationship. One afternoon, Betty was approached on the sidewalk by a female staff member of the
Selma Times-Journal
, who warned, “If you plan to stay with
that
man, you'd better get out of town.” “I'm not going anywhere,” Betty responded. In the paint shop after her boss had commented, “That Randall Miller is one black man who sure believes he's white,” Betty replied sharply, “No, Randall Miller is one black man who sure believes in working hard.” Randall's wife telephoned Betty at times, threatening bodily harm if the affair did not end; but it continued without interruption until Betty's exasperated husband removed their daughters from school, gave up his job, and, with Betty accompanying him, returned to Arkansas. She remained there for nearly ten months. Then in late 1985, anticipating her divorce, she returned alone to Selma, rented an apartment, and resumed seeing Randall Miller, this time doing so with more openness.